Perhaps it was owing to
his own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so confused an
impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only purely
musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and
irreducible into any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in
an instant, is, so to speak, an impression _sine materia_. Presumably the
notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out before our eyes,
over surfaces greater or smaller according to their pitch and volume; to
trace arabesque designs, to give us the sensation of breath or tenuity,
stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these
sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those
which the following, or even simultaneous notes have already begun to
awaken in us. And this indefinite perception would continue to smother in
its molten liquidity the _motifs_ which now and then emerge, barely
discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown; recognised only by
the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe,
to recollect, to name; ineffable;--if our memory, like a labourer who
toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the
waves, did not, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases,
enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow.
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